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Peering into another’s private world often comes with a thrill. And for many years, the snapshots taken by regular folks to document their lives have made a great conduit for taking a look. A trove of these snaps, known as “vernacular” photographs, will be on display for the first time ever at Saint Louis Art Museum, starting this weekend.

"Poetics of the Everyday: Amateur Photography, 1890-1970" comprises a recent gift from St. Louis collectors John and Teenuh Foster. They document what regular people wanted to capture during the first half of the 20th century, when camera technology moved out of rarified circles and into the hands of everyday people. Eric Lutz, associate curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at SLAM, curated the 110 prints on display.

They are found photographs by unseen people of unknown families doing unclear things—which makes them compelling and intimate, even as they are all unhinged from the people and moments that led to the creation of the image.

“They’ve been collected over the last two decades from a variety of sources,” says Lutz. “A lot of it was on eBay during the early days, when you could get a lot of interesting things and there weren’t as many bidders.”

The Fosters have been sorting through the proverbial haystack of available unknown photography for the past 20 years, and the snaps on display are nothing but needles. The images are familiar, like well-thumbed family photo albums, and also bizarre, artistic, hilarious and moving—sometimes all at once.

“Great pictures can be taken as much by accident or experimentation as by intention,” Lutz says.

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A double exposed image of twin girls in their 1950s Sunday best is cute, but also quite haunting. A snap from the 1940s taken at just the right moment during a canine fence leap has competing energies of man, dog, and late summer corn in a nearly formal composition. And a look through a car’s windshield and into its rearview mirror during a 1960s cruise evokes the saga of the open road.

“They’re just so compelling in person,” says Lutz. “They have so much presence to them. You relate to them in a very physical way—you know they are meant to be held and turned over and touched and laughed at.”

Humans are making more images now than ever before—open up your phone and see how many shots of your sunbeam-wallowing kitty you took to get the one that was Insta-perfect. Ironically, though, we’re not leaving behind the physical legacy of our ancestors. No one’s going to sneak around Grandma’s attic 40 years from now and find a dusty box full of her most-liked Facebook posts.

“I think that whole swaths of our own personal as well as cultural history are going to get lost as technologies shift,” Lutz says. “Every day, you hear of somebody losing their phone, losing their information. Unless you take the trouble to print things out in physical form, there’s no guarantee you’ll have it.”

The impulse to take a picture, says Lutz, is an active engagement with the world, a way of investigating or responding to a new sensation. The camera, he says, focuses the photographer’s attention, and that impulse, that spark, is as much a part of the experience as the actual picture of your cousins grinning at a carnival.

“These images are great because they’re grounded in the real world,” Lutz says. “We look at them and we see these details. We get like half the picture, but the context is lost in time so it just invites us to add our own story. We can’t help by try to finish the other half.”

Spend some time finishing the conversation from the opening on April 26 through August 25, in galleries 234 and 235 at Saint Louis Art Museum.